1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of enterprise computing environment administration and more particularly to the automated and assisted configuration of operations in an enterprise computing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Component based user applications address the rigid nature of unitary, consolidated applications which are programmed to support a particular application need without providing substantial flexibility. In the unitary, consolidated application, little can be done if the particular application needs change. By comparison, in component based computing, different components provide atomic elements of application functionality. Individual components can be combined with other components to dynamically assemble an application which provides a specific type of functionality to flexibly support a particular application need, even as the application needs change. Examples of component based computing implementations include collaborative computing applications and portal computing environments.
Portal frameworks support a component based model for building user facing applications. Portal applications represent assemblies of user-facing components which can be combined in different ways to produce different applications. Portlets are the visibly active, user-facing components included as part of portal pages. Similar to the graphical windows paradigm of windowing operating systems, each portlet in a portal application occupies a portion of the portal page through which the portlet can display associated content from a portlet channel. The prototypical portlet can be implemented as a server-side script executed through a portal server.
The component based model supports the deployment of customer solutions from multiple different computing components, including different Web servers, application servers and the like. Yet deploying different computing components in coordination to enable the aggregate solution can require a great deal of coordination—particularly during installation and update operations that traverse the different components. In fact, to administer operations that traverse the different computing components, a level of expertise and familiarity can be required of the administrator.
Specifically, an enhanced level of expertise and familiarity with the administration of operations that traverse different components in an aggregated customer solution can be required because no single set of documentation generally exists for the combination of components forming the customer solution. Rather, documentation exists only for the individual components of the customer solution. Moreover, automating the operation can require a similar level of expertise and familiarity. Thus, for the typical customer, the process of administering and automating an operation across the different components of a component based customer solution has proven difficult.